Fridge With A Mind Of Its Own

May 16, 2018

Well not exactly. Let’s just say the refrigerator may not always be focused on keeping your lettuce crisp.

In a recent Express post, Harvey Gavin reports that hackers could seize control of your Samsung refrigerator and use it to mine bitcoin. And it’s not just the fridge. The entire network of household appliances could adopt the bitcoin craze and subordinate the icing of your tea to the appropriation of cryptocurrency. This is the part where you tell your friends on game day, “Hold my beer and watch this. We’re gonna mine us some bitcoin during the halftime show.”

The Good Old Days

Call me a Luddite, but sometimes I long for the days of yore, when a fridge kept the beer cold and we printed money down at the Treasury, with the involvement and oversight of the U.S. Government. And yet we run headlong into an age of smart homes with centralized devices like a Google Home of Amazon Alexa. Not only are all of our conversations recorded and mined, rumor has it Alexa has begun randomly uttering a witch-like cackle in the middle of the night. As they say at the rodeo, “If that don’t get your fire started, your wood’s wet.”

What’s The Point?

While we may have gotten too smart for our britches (but not our breaches), there seems little chance of putting that genie back in the bottle. When you leave your smart home and go to the smart office, that vulnerability rides along. ICS can help you make sense of your organization’s exposure. Call today, but post a guard at the networked printer in the meantime. It looks suspicious.